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Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP)

JC GIBBONS: Improving Worker Skills and Operations With Training

With the help of: Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (MMTC)

About

In 1959, John Clifton Gibbons used his entire life savings to purchase some screw machining equipment. JC Gibbons Manufacturing, Inc., was born from that bold investment. Nearly 60 years later, this machining company is still owned by the Gibbons family. JC Gibbons Manufacturing provides high-quality precision CNC machining services and screw machining products to customers. With both 4-axis and 5-axis CNC machines, JC Gibbons Manufacturing can produce parts for any industry, including automotive, heavy truck, defense, electronics, HVAC, seating and aerospace. JC Gibbons Manufacturing employs 25 at their Livonia, Michigan, location.

The Challenge

Committed to advancing the skills of their workers while generating significant impacts to the company, JC Gibbons was interested in training to improve business practices. Leadership wanted to ensure focus was placed on maintaining quality while identifying additional areas where production could be improved.
The Center’s assistance helped our company make a number of improvements in both our workforce and operations. Without training, we wouldn’t have been able to get our internal auditors in place to help keep our QMS on track, and some of our workers would still be lacking the skills needed to understand blueprints. Additionally, we’re excited about the potential cost savings we could have due to the changes made with value stream mapping.
— Dan Gibbons, Vice President

MEP's Role

The Michigan Manufacturing Technology Center (The Center), part of the Michigan MEP and the MEP National Network™, provided training to support the improvement initiatives. First, recognizing that there was a disparity in blueprint reading literacy levels among team members, the management team at JC Gibbons Manufacturing decided training would be beneficial to get everyone on the same page. This training gave workers better understanding of blueprints and enabled them to provide more value to their jobs.

With two existing internal auditors already at their facility, company leaders decided additional employees should become auditors as well. With this training completed, there are now more diverse, fresh minds analyzing their quality management system (QMS), providing added insight and input to ensure quality is consistently maintained.

JC Gibbons Manufacturing worked with experts at The Center to map out their entire production process and locate any bottlenecks or issues. With workers shocked at how many times each produced part was unnecessarily touched, the team realized they were the source of bottlenecks and worked to identify ways to improve production. Following this, JC Gibbons Manufacturing and The Center decided it would be best to replace the many inspection buckets around their facility with larger bins, which served to decrease the total amount of inspections needed and lowered the number of tasks involved overall, ultimately decreasing bottlenecks in production.

Created October 31, 2023